The High-Speed Hunt for Fentanyl and Machine Guns in America’s Heartland

WAUSAU, Wis. — The pursuit began on a freezing afternoon in early January, a high-stakes gamble played out across the flat, snow-dusted expanses of Marathon County. To the casual observer traveling down State Highway 34, the scene resembled a standard, albeit terrifying, highway pursuit: a suspect vehicle weaving desperately through light traffic, pursued by a phalanx of local sheriff cruisers with sirens wailing.

But behind the flashing lights lay weeks of painstaking, invisible intelligence gathering. This was not a routine traffic stop gone wrong. It was the climax of a coordinated inter-agency operation spearheaded by the FBI’s Central Wisconsin Narcotics Task Force—a multi-jurisdictional dragnet designed to disrupt the flow of lethal synthetic opioids pouring into the American heartland.

Rare body-worn camera footage, recently obtained and released after a protracted legal effort by public safety archivists, offers an unprecedented, raw look at the front lines of the domestic drug war. The footage captures a cascading series of events that began with a routine narcotics track and ended with the discovery of an arsenal that resembled a small insurgent militia, highlighting the increasingly volatile intersection of drug trafficking and military-grade weaponry in rural America.

Part I: The Chase on Highway 34

The investigation culminated on January 6, 2023, when federal and local operators learned that a primary target, identified as Jacob, had just visited his principal drug supplier. Armed with real-time intelligence, the task force tracked his vehicle as it moved across central Wisconsin, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. When officers attempted to corral the vehicle, Jacob stepped on the gas.

The dashcam and radio logs paint a frantic picture of the minutes that followed.

“Signal given. He is not stopping at this point,” an officer radios, his voice remarkably level against the background drone of a roaring engine.

“Road traffic is light, speeds at about 80 in the right lane,” another deputy reports.

Within seconds, the pursuit escalates from dangerous to lethal. As the landscape blurs into a monochrome smear of bare trees and snowbanks, the suspect’s vehicle pushes past the 100 mph mark.

“We’re one mile south of 34, right-hand lane. At 105,” the lead unit calls out. The command from the supervisor is stark: “Get them if you can.”

The pursuit ended abruptly, punctuated by the crunch of metal and the screech of tires as the suspect’s vehicle collided with another car. Before the dust could fully settle, the driver’s side door remained pinned shut. Jacob, desperate to evade a federal prison sentence, scrambled across the center console, threw a heavy bag from the car, and attempted to flee on foot.

He didn’t get far.

With rifles trained on the wreckage, officers ordered the remaining passenger to crawl through the shattered driver’s side window.

“I didn’t do anything, sir! What did I do?” the passenger cried out, hands locked on his head as he was pressed into the frozen asphalt and handcuffed.

As the adrenaline began to recede, officers walked back to the path of the foot chase. Sitting in the snow was the bag Jacob had discarded: it contained 102 grams of pure, unadulterated fentanyl.

Part II: “Just a Police Pursuit”

Back at the local police department, the atmosphere shifted from the chaotic violence of the highway to the clinical environment of an interrogation and processing room. Jacob, bruised but cooperative in the face of overwhelming evidence, sat before a local traffic officer for field sobriety testing.

“I know you were involved in that crash. How you feeling?” the officer asked, holding up a finger to track the suspect’s ocular responses.

“Good,” Jacob mumbled, his bravado entirely drained.

“Follow the tip of my finger with your eyes and your eyes only,” the officer instructed, checking for the telltale signs of nystagmus—the involuntary jerking of the eyes that indicates severe chemical impairment. Moments later, Jacob blew into a portable breathalyzer.

“Turn around. Place your hands behind your back,” the officer said calmly. “You’re under arrest for OWI as well.”

The Profile of a Trafficker During a post-arrest interview with federal agents, Jacob’s defense crumbled. He admitted not only to possessing the 102 grams of fentanyl recovered from the snowbanks with the intent to distribute it, but he also confessed to trafficking another 70 grams of the deadly synthetic opioid just days prior.

A search of Jacob’s person yielded a small, nondescript key. It belonged to a heavy safe located in his residence. After securing a federal search warrant, task force members breached the home and opened the vault. Inside, the true nature of the operation came into focus: a Glock handgun, a substantial cache of methamphetamine, and additional packages of fentanyl.

The legal hammer fell swiftly. Federal prosecutors charged Jacob with possession of over 50 grams of fentanyl with intent to deliver, possession of methamphetamine, fleeing and eluding an officer, and his fourth offense of operating a motor vehicle under the influence. He later entered a guilty plea in U.S. District Court. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he faces a mandatory minimum of 5 years and up to 40 years in a federal penitentiary, alongside a potential $5 million fine.

Part III: The Secondary Threat

While Jacob’s arrest was a significant victory for the Narcotics Task Force, a secondary, perhaps more terrifying encounter was unfolding concurrently on the other side of town—one that underscores the operational complexity the FBI faces when working alongside local police.

Officers had converged on a local commercial establishment where an associate of the ring, a convicted felon named Brady Eltz, had been spotted acting suspiciously. The bodycam footage from this encounter reveals how quickly a narcotics investigation can mutate into a homeland security emergency.

When officers approached Eltz, he attempted to blend into the background, casually slipping into a public restroom to discard his cargo. An alert store employee pointed officers toward the back corridor: “Hey, follow me. He’s in the bathroom right now.”

Agents caught Eltz just as he emerged.

Below the sink in the public restroom, officers recovered two 9mm handguns. One of them had been modified with a “Glock switch”—a small, illicit aftermarket auto-sear that converts a standard semi-automatic pistol into a fully automatic machine gun capable of firing 1,200 rounds per minute.

“This is shocking to me,” Eltz muttered as he was led away in handcuffs.

“I’m sure it is,” the arresting officer replied dryly.

The investigation into Eltz quickly expanded to his vehicle parked outside. A glance through the passenger window revealed a bullet hole puncturing the front door. On the back seat lay a collection of high-capacity rifles.

“He had at least five or six fully loaded ARs and shotguns,” an investigator is heard telling a supervisor on the scene. “One of them’s got a 30-round drum. He was really panicked about us getting in there.”

Part IV: An Insurgent’s Cache in a Small Town Trunk

The subsequent search of Eltz’s impounded vehicle transformed a routine firearms arrest into something far more ominous. Inside the trunk, detectives and federal agents discovered an arsenal tailored for urban warfare:

Three additional firearms, including a stolen rifle modified to fire fully automatically.

Two Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), one of which was an explosive simulator traced back to a U.S. Army base.

Hundreds of rounds of specialty ammunition, military-grade body armor, gun sights, and tactical holsters.

Surveillance and evasion gear, including GPS trackers, multiple combat knives, latex face masks, and an electronic voice-changing device.

Eltz was no stranger to the justice system, boasting a violent criminal history with unlawful firearm convictions stretching back to 2007. Having served a five-year prison sentence following a 2013 conviction, Eltz was well aware that his possession of a single cartridge violated federal law—let alone an arsenal of converted machine guns and military explosives. For this latest incident, he was sentenced to four years in prison.

The Invisible War on 2 Milligrams

The release of this footage by the organization Midwest Safety, which required years of open-records litigation and the work of dozens of researchers, offers the public a rare window into the operational reality of modern American law enforcement.

To the public, drug enforcement looks like the climax of a movie: high-speed pursuits, broken glass, and dramatic foot chases. But law enforcement officials emphasize that these five-minute bursts of adrenaline are bought with weeks of tedious, dangerous surveillance, digital tracking, and informant management.

The stakes could not be higher. Fentanyl has fundamentally transformed the landscape of American crime and public health. A mere 2 milligrams of the synthetic opioid—an amount that can fit on the tip of a pencil—is considered a lethal dose for the average adult.

According to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) laboratory analyses, counterfeit prescription pills flooding the American market contain anywhere from 0.002 to 5.1 milligrams of fentanyl per tablet. In essence, a single pill bought on a street corner in Wisconsin can contain more than twice the lethal dose.

“This wasn’t luck that caught these guys,” a task force official noted, reflecting on the Marathon County operation. “This was investigative work at its finest. What the public doesn’t see is the weeks of legwork, the officers putting their lives on the line to take even one dealer off the street. Because fentanyl doesn’t care where you live, what you believe, or how safe you think your community is.”

As Jacob and Brady Eltz trade their civilian clothes for federal prison jumpsuits, the Central Wisconsin Narcotics Task Force continues its work. In the ongoing crisis of the American opioid epidemic, one market disruption ends, and the next investigation begins.